The Business Rusch: Anti-Published

I didn’t read my five newspapers this morning. I’m cranky about that. I love my newspapers. I read them on my iPad, and don’t mind the advertising at all, even though I accidentally click on the ads once in a while. (And please, don’t tell anyone: Occasionally, I investigate the product.) Which is way more than I used to do when I read paper newspapers. Sometimes I have the attention span of a hummingbird, and I’ll often forget what I saw the moment I close the page.

So yes, newspaper ad revenues are down significantly. Newspaper readership is down significantly, which is part of the problem. But I wonder if the effectiveness of ads has risen in the past sixty years (which is the length of that study). When my ex and I had a frame shop and art gallery in the early 1980s, we soon discovered that newspaper ads brought in zero shoppers, but radio ads paid off amazingly. Just saying. Things change.

Like my reading habits. The neat-o thing about reading on a tablet is this: If you see something you want to check out, all you need to do is hit a link, and you’ve checked it out.

Which is why I missed my newspapers in my reading window this morning. I checked out Dean’s new blog, then remembered that I needed to look at one other online thing before I got to writing this blog, and suddenly I was eight references deep in Scott Turow nastiness.

I had planned to blog a bit about Turow, but really, with this kind of bandwidth, I don’t have to. Check them out.

What you need to know is this: Our ignorant friend Mr. Turow believes that the American Author is under siege, that we’re losing ground, and that the Great American novel will disappear.

He published that ridiculousness three days ago.

Let me show you the life of a so-called besieged American author. My life.

In the past three days, I have:

1. Negotiated a subsidiary rights contract directly with a publisher, with a seven-year term limit. The contract pays well—and bonus!, it states point blank that the publisher only wants these particular rights. All of the other rights are reserved to the author. It makes that statement repeatedly, throughout the contract, adding later that nothing in this contract can be misconstrued to allow the publisher any additional rights. (Y’know. Like those e-rights that some publishers are currently claiming were hidden in contracts from the 1970s.)

2. Dealt with a fantastic Hollywood producer who has a series of mine under option, and is currently fielding meeting after meeting about that property. (A friend of mine, who works for a major studio, recently confirmed her contact with him. Nice to have outside confirmation of this stuff.) Fingers crossed, although I don’t believe anything will happen until…well, the check is cashed, the movie/TV show greenlighted, and an audience is actually viewing the thing.

7. Lined out my writing schedule, which is beyond full with a) projects I want to do and b)projects fans have asked for. Note that’s an “and” not an “or.” I want to do this things, and bonus!, people want to read them.

8. Exchanged e-mails with several big name authors over personal matters, all of whom are excited about the changes in publishing.

9. Read even more blogs about writers who have careers again, when they once believed their careers had ended.

10. Discovered that a writer whose work I had searched for for years had published five novels I was unaware of. This was my favorite moment of the three days. Seriously.

Phillip Rock wrote a novel called The Passing Bells and I read it in 1981 or 1982, at a particularly difficult point in my life. I loved, loved, loved that book, and it was clear that there were sequels. Only I never found them. I haunted bookstores, I asked booksellers, I searched for the following books in used bookstores for at least fifteen years. At least.

Then I gave up.

So I was reading an article in Romantic Times about books that Downton Abbey fans would love, and viola! Some smart person at a traditional publishing house reissued the Rock trilogy. Trilogy! I hadn’t know it was a trilogy! And I ordered all three books, online, in five seconds.

They’ll be here soonest, because I want paper. I want to hold those puppies in my hands just to convince myself that they’re real.

But I could have had them and started reading them in seconds. (Okay, I did. I scanned the opening of The Passing Bells to see if it was as good as I remembered, and the writing was better than I remembered. Oh, I’m thrilled.)

These books were dead. In fact, I searched to find out why I never located the other books. I don’t know the full story. But here’s what soon became clear. Only The Passing Bells had a mass market paperback edition. So most of the used bookstores I haunted would never have had a copy of the second and third books in the series, because most of those stores specialized in mass market paper, not hardcover.

Phillip Rock did not publish any more books after the third book (that I can find), even though he lived another twenty years.

What it looks like to me is this: the book sales went down on the trilogy for some unknown reason, so he couldn’t get another book deal.

I could be wrong about that, but that’s what the scant evidence points to.

And I remembered his book from thirty years ago with such excitement that I went to my computer and ordered immediately.

Books that were dead. Impossible to find. In fact, on Amazon, the mass market paperback of The Passing Bells was selling for $90.00. Limited availability, obviously, and obviously, someone besides me wanted copies.

How many of you have had this experience in the last three years? A writer whose work you loved, a writer whose work you couldn’t find, had a book reissued and/or reissued the book him or herself.

The Passing Bells was interesting in that the book came out of a traditional publisher. I don’t know if someone at the publishing house remembered his work and compared it to Downton Abbey, or if his estate pushed this, but whatever happened, traditional publishing did something right in this case. At least for me, the reader. I have no idea what the behind-the-scenes story is for the writer’s estate, except to say this: Rock was gone by the time the books were reissued. He didn’t live to see this.

While I wait for Rock’s books to arrive, I’m reading Linda Nagata, who has been a favorite of mine for more than fifteen years. She vanished too, discouraged by the problems in traditional publishing. Now she’s back, publishing her own work—and it’s stellar. She answered Charlie Stross on his site (good on you for allowing this, Charlie) on why she self-publishes. You can find the link here.

In fact, Linda’s not the only writer who is jumping with joy (maybe literally) about all the opportunities in front of her. In fact, Linda was not the only writer who was celebrating her freedom while Scott Turow released his stink bomb on the rest of the world.

As her contracts with her traditional publisher have come due, she did some pretty serious analysis. She had released a few books herself, books she couldn’t sell traditionally, and she had a lot of success with them. But her traditional books hit the stores as mass market paperbacks, a form that her readers preferred. So she weighed what to do with the next book in her successful series.

She writes:

…when deciding what to do, I had to take a lot of things into consideration. Book stores are closing, store shelves are shrinking, and my print run between ENRAPTURED and ENSLAVED (only six months!) dropped by 20,000 books. There was no guarantee Wal-Mart (who was the biggest buyer for my print books) was going to pick up the next book in the series, and at 4% royalties (most people don’t realize authors get reduced royalties from sales at Wal-Mart, so at a $4.99 sale price, I make less than 20 cents a book on my Wal-Mart print sales) I couldn’t come up with a valid reason to take a crappy contract JUST to say I was “traditionally” published. Especially when I looked at the fact the MAJORITY of my sales were coming in digital form. If there’s one thing I want readers to understand, it’s that this was not an easy decision for me to make, but at the end of the day I realized that if I wanted to continue writing this series (which I do!), I couldn’t do it for free anymore.

She decided, as so many of us have, that the only way she’ll accept a traditional book publishing contract these days, is to have a “contract would have to be enticing enough to draw me away from the income I’m now making.”

That income? It’s exploding for her:

To give you an idea of how my life has changed since I began self publishing, in 2011 (traditionally published only) I reported a negative income on my taxes. In 2012 (after I began self publishing–and it’s important to note that the majority of my income that year came from self published books, NOT my traditionally published books), I reported six figures. In 2013, we’re projecting I’ll be approaching the seven figure mark. To me, that’s a HUGE difference.

It’s important to note that she hit the New York Times bestseller list with her self-published work, not with the traditionally published work. We’re seeing this phenomenon more and more these days. That whole meme that traditional publishing puts out there, the one that says they’re the only way into bookstores and the only way to hit the bestseller lists? That meme isn’t true at all.

A friend is testing a new way into bookstores by partnering with a large business that caters to indie publishers, and we’ll see how that goes. If it goes well, I’ll report here. And of course, there’s Ella Distribution, which is setting up a new way to go into bookstores as well.

Romance writers and disgruntled sf writers like me aren’t the only ones who’ve gone to the indie side. Mystery Writers of America Grand Master, New York Times bestseller, and multiple award winner, Lawrence Block had a response to Scott Turow’s stink bomb as well. On April 8, Block moved an older post to the top of his for-writers page, because it had already answered Turow, before Turow wrote this latest stupidity.

In 2012, Block wrote that, back in the bad old days, “when my fellows and I would gather, glass in hand, for an evening of sociable shoptalk, the inanities of agents and editors and publishers were a frequent topic of conversation. Hell, all the bastards did was screw things up. But if we could do it ourselves—”

Then they’d realize that they couldn’t do it themselves, except (he later points out) that wasn’t entirely true. They weren’t willing to do it themselves. It was considerably harder in them thar days (back when I was a young ’un as well). Especially for these reasons:

If you were writing fiction for a far-flung audience, you wouldn’t get anywhere publishing it yourself. How were you going to get reviewed? How were you going to get the book in stores? How would anyone who might want to read it ever learn of its existence?

But, as he points out, publishing evolved and changed and got more corporate (which is not to say better). Books had to “ sell an ever-increasing number of copies in order to show up in black ink on a corporation’s balance sheet.”

Bookstores were closing, sales were down, midlist writers were being cut. But Block wasn’t being cut, although the changes were having an impact on him.

He writes:

My advances were down. And my books were getting harder to find. The new ones got shelf space, but the mass market backlist titles did not; for years my paperbacks filled two shelf sections at a Barnes & Noble, and then one day I stopped at a B&N and could only find one copy each of four titles. And it’s been like that ever since.

So he eased into self-publishing, and slowly understood how great control of his own product was. His visibility on the self-published titles was as good or better than it was through his traditional publisher. As he got his rights back to some of his older work, he didn’t even consider trying to resell those books traditionally. (Are you noticing a pattern here?)

Now, he writes,

My default response, when someone asks how to get an agent, or how to find a publisher, or any writerly version of what-do-I-do-now, is to suggest publishing it oneself. That’s a course I never would have recommended to anyone, except perhaps the occasional dotard who’d penned a memoir he hoped his grandchildren would read. And now I’m urging it upon everyone—writers whose publishers have dropped them, writers who never had publishers in the first place, writers whose early books have gone out of print.

Will everyone have a good experience with self-publishing? No, of course not, nor will every book show a profit. But it has never been so easy for readers and writers to find one another, and for any book to find its proper audience.

Take that, Mr. Scott Turow and all of you who believe the sky is falling. Or maybe you unbelievers should listen to Hugh Howey, who got some space on Salon.com just before Mr. Turow spewed his ignorance all over the mainstream media. Salon.com, which most folks in publishing read as religiously as the New York Times. (Why don’t you, Turow? Are you that far behind the times? Oh, never mind, you already answered that).

Anyway, as Hugh Howey said, the real story in indie publishing isn’t Howey or Amanda Hocking or even Barry Eisler. It’s the hundreds (maybe thousands) of writers who are making the bills by indie publishing. Sure, these writers aren’t always making thousands per month, but they’re making hundreds per month. And I know from rather desperate personal experience that at certain times in the careers of 99% of all writers, hundreds per month is sheer gold.

The problem with Turow in particular, and a handful of others in the same circumstance, is that they were bestsellers from their first novel. Which makes them rather like that Coach Barry Switzer quote: “Some people were born on third base and thought they hit a triple.”

Yes, these privileged writers wrote good books and they were lucky enough to sell those books the first time out for good money, and surprisingly, those books were published well, and these few fortunate writers went on to have good careers without hitting the pitfalls that the rest of us have encountered.

Until now, of course. Hard times hit us all, just in different ways.

Turow is looking at decreasing royalties, and low sales figures (comparatively speaking), and is blaming the wrong people for it. Amazon? Naw. Foreign countries? Naw. The Supreme Court? Naw.

He just needs to blame himself for being asleep at the switch and not noticing the changes in publishing, even though he’s feeling them each and every day.

What I’m hearing, what I’m experiencing, is exactly what a dear friend of mine said in e-mail the other day. This long-term New York Times bestseller says that in the next year or two, their earnings from new writing will be a small portion of their overall income. The rest will come from backlist, from previously published work.

That’s new, folks. It hasn’t happened to most of us before, even New York Times bestsellers. See Lawrence Block’s quote above. How can you sell books when they aren’t on store shelves?

Or rather, let me get my tenses right: How could you sell books when they weren’t on store shelves?

Amazon and all the other online retailers keep books on a virtual shelf, and available forever.

Gone are the days that shocked some readers of this blog last week, when I mentioned that for the first timeever, all of my Retrieval Artist novels—a series, mind you—are in print. If you like one, you can buy the others. And that’s new. It’s never happened to this series before.

I was shocked that the readers were shocked because, you see, I have published six series, and until this past year, none of those series—not a one—had more than one book in print at the same time.

These series were in different genres, under different names, and spanned a twenty-year period. They were all traditionally published.

I am not alone in this. The people I’ve been e-mailing back and forth lately are all well-published traditional writers who have gone indie or are in the process of going indie. The reason? Because we have control now, and like Elizabeth Naughton, we are making more money than we ever have before on our writing.

We have also experienced those moments when we’ve lost work—property, not work time, but actual copyrights—to other people’s stupidity.

Look at the other thing that’s been filling the blogosphere this past week: The posts on the death of Night Shade Books. Dean and I met the guys running Night Shade at the Denver World Science Fiction Convention in 2008 and had drinks with them to discuss the publishing business. The publishers of Night Shade sounded like Dean and I must have in the early days of Pulphouse—excited and enthusiastic and utterly clueless about certain things.

We tried to hand the Night Shade guys some clues. They laughed us off.

We are not surprised by the situation they find themselves in.

The problem here, with Night Shade, is that they had long and rather traditional publishing contracts. Pulphouse did not. When we went under, we took no writer’s work with us. (Although it took a while to pay some of those writers the amount owed them.) Now, a lot of writers find themselves in the unenviable position of having to choose between a (now less) crappy deal or losing the copyrights to that work altogether in a bankruptcy proceeding because these writers chose to be part of traditional publishing.

That’s the only reason. The writers have no culpability in this, although they will pay a great price for someone else’s mistake.

I’m still dealing with traditional publishing problems. From a major sf publisher who, for some inane reason, always “forgets” to send out fall royalty statements (and then sends out weirdly inaccurate statements in the spring), to a publisher who went from having the best contracts in the business to the worst contracts in the business without a change of personnel, I’m still putting out stupid fires that aren’t of my own making.

Fortunately, I’m not struggling to save my career, like I’ve done every other time that problems like these have come up.

Bestselling mystery writer Carole Nelson Douglas summed it up best in her e-mail to me earlier in the week. We’ve been comparing notes on our new publishing revival and she’s the one who coined the phrase I’ve used in my title. She gave me permission to quote her.

She writes, “I consider I spent most of my career being ‘anti-published.’ Just constant watching and nagging and holding your breath that all the ‘dropped balls’ wouldn’t sink you.”

When I asked her if I could use this, she said yes, so long as I mentioned “it’s from the experience of going through six NY publishing houses over a 60-novel career.”

We’ve been trading war stories. Just like I have with other writers. What’s odd is that so many of these stories were just the way that the business worked back not ten years ago. We had to accept it and try to survive it.

No more.

This week, in addition to my list of ten things, so much more happened, wonderful stuff or at least, heartwarming things.

First, for me, you guys have been great in the way that you’ve helped me celebrate the fourth anniversary of this blog. You let me know how much you like it and rely on it, but you also celebrated with me, and you celebrated the changes, like I have.

Second, readers have rallied around David Farland (Wolverton) and his son Ben. Ben was in a terrible, awful, horrible long-boarding accident and due to a circumstance that’s too complicated to explain (plus it’s not my place to do so), the family had no insurance. Ben’s care will cost millions. (I am not exaggerating here.)

Fans, writers, and casual readers have rallied, donating money yes, but even more impressive, buying Dave’s indie published books all day yesterday in what they’re calling a “Book Bomb.” The fans are putting numbers—real numbers—behind the various algorithms that get books noticed by Amazon and the other services. This will have a halo effect on Dave’s income because the money goes directly to him, not to some publisher who will sit on it or apply it to reserve against returns, and maybe send a check six months to a year after the money was earned.

(I say maybe because that publisher who missed the fall royalty statement? That one? That publisher theoretically owes me thousands of dollars. I say theoretically, because they’re calculating the royalties in a weird non-contractual manner which makes no sense to me. Like most things in traditional publishing, I guess.)

My heart is warmed by the instant support Dave and his family are receiving. Readers, who are doing their best to repay Dave for all the hours of enjoyment he gave them, are donating small amounts. But those small amounts add up to large sums. Plus, they’re tweeting this and pinning it and putting it on their Facebook pages.

I’m putting it here in hopes some of you will either buy a book or donate to the fund. You can and should still participate. This halo effect can last for weeks.

I love this new world. Hugh Howey ends his article in Salon the same way that Jeremy Greenfield ends his in Forbes, the way I’m going to end this post now.

It’s the best time to be a writer. The American author—hell, authors worldwide—aren’t dying out. They’re not even threatened. They’re doing better than they’ve ever done, because we can go direct to the fans now.

Writers who are aware of this are enjoying a renaissance, and fans—well, they’re like me with my Phillip Rock experience. We’re catching up on books that we thought we’d never be able to read because traditional publishing was always looking for the newest, brightest, shiniest thing at the expense of the familiar, at the expense of the slow-growing product, at the expense of writers and readers. Traditional publishers believe that bookstores are their target market.

I can tell them, the writers Hugh Howey mentions in his blog can tell them, Carole Nelson Douglas can tell them, and Elizabeth Naughton can tell them, that our target market is readers. Readers who love those few hours of enjoyment, and will tell others about it.

Readers who love this world as much as the savvy writers do.

Maybe readers love it more.

I know that my instant response to someone like Turow (and he’s not alone in his hidebound idiocy) isn’t contempt or a desire to make fool out of him. It’s sadness.

Sadness that he’s missing a great revolution. Sadness that he believes this bright new world filled with possibilities is a dark, horrible, scary place.

It’s not. It’s truly the best of times. And I’m happy that these changes have happened while I can still participate in them. I’m not lamenting the death of the American author. I’m celebrating the life that infuses the industry these days.

I am thrilled at all the changes. I wish everyone else was.

As I said above, you all are wonderful. Great comments last week, great private e-mails and notes on social media. And thank you for the donations as well.

I am so busy right now with new deadlines and incredible projects that I’d love to give up sleep, but I can’t. So I’m stealing time from things I normally used to do. I don’t have as much time to answer the comments on the blog, although I read everything. So please continue to comment! And I’m writing double blogs right now, so that I have some in the can for the weeks when I need concentrated fiction-writing time.

Eventually, I’ll get back to the research-heavy blog posts that I need to do for the estate stuff, but right now, I’m deep in three different time-consuming projects, two of which involve research. I’ll get back to the others soon.

This might sound like complaining, but it’s not. I’m thrilled at being this busy. If you had asked me ten years ago what would allow me to do everything I wanted as a writer and still make money, I would have said nothing. I figured I’d have to pick and choose between projects.

35 Comments

My favourite comment I’ve seen on the Turow thing recently was from Bob Mayer. He basically challenged Turow that to put his money where his mouth is and told him that if he believed Amazon was “the enemy” that he should immediately get all his works delisted from Amazon.

I just went to Amazon and see that Turow’s books are all there still. Bob called this hypocrisy….I agree. Seems like another of Turow’s contradictory positions is that Amazon are the enemy and authors should band together against the enemy, but he’s happy for the enemy to sell his books.

The other thing that rankles is that he’s happy to air his views – but then makes no attempt to answer critical comments.

I’d feel sorry for him too IF his frequent postings showed that he at least had taken the time to research all the facts and come to a conclusion.

I’m just now dealing with a major pub who ‘forgot’ the fall statement. And fellow authors sales aren’t reflected in the Spring statement. And they can’t figure out a formula to pay us for their subscription service. Very déjà vu here.

If you don’t mind, would you e-mail me at the contact link with the name of the publisher? It sounds like a different one from mine, but if it’s the same, then that’s valuable to know as well. Here’s the link: http://kriswrites.com/contact-kris/

Definitely agree. I’m one of those success stories; I was on the brink of homelessness when self-publishing saved me. I don’t make much; barely enough to pay the rent and utilities, and groceries, but it happened quick.

I was running out of money and out of goodwill among the friends I was couch surfing with when I decided to self-publish. Made $10 my first month in Dec 2011, $250 my second, and by June I was earning four figures. I don’t know if traditional publishing could have put the cash I needed in hand so quickly.

So every time I hear about naysayers warbling about how the sky is falling, it just reminds me that self-publishing saved my life.

Thank you for the heads-up about David Farland/Wolverton. I’ll be adding my 2 sticks of dynamite to the book bomb today.

As for finding writers who I THOUGHT had dropped off the face of the Earth, I’ve found several, but Barry Longyear is probably my favorite. He wrote the book “Enemy Mine,” which was made into the SF movie. I thought the book was much better than the movie, though the movie was good, and then could find little of his work after that. Now, he’s been posting his excellent SF at Amazon, etc., and Hallelujah, it’s great. I’ve been slowly chewing my way through his backlist.

I love indie publishing because I can find lesser-known writers and ALL their books. When I was a kid, I only had a small Waldenbooks at the mall and a pitiful branch library to get books from. By the age of ten, I’d read pretty much everything in the library. When the first B&N came to town when I was in high school, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I started using Amazon when it was just a blue page with a couple recommendations on it. It’s a great time to be a writer, and it’s an awesome time to be a reader.

I agree 100% with the sentiment that publishing has never seemed to vital and exciting. I wish more people shared your enthusiasm. The influx of new voices doesn’t water down the medium, it makes it better.

I am excited to see how writing as a business adapts. Will the ebook alter the structure of the novel? Will short form writing take off? The possibilities are boundless.

All I’ll say is that it’s obvious Scott Turow is scared of this new digital world; all he’s known for a long time is paper.

Embrace change or die. (I don’t know where I got that from, but I heard or read it somewhere. I think. :-))

Anyway, I like the “anti-publishing” quote from Carole Nelson Douglas. It’s only recently that I’m getting into her Midnight Louie books (the first one is a scream, as it takes you behind the scenes of a typical, for 1996 or so, book convention). Amazing that she has 60 novels under her belt; then again, I shouldn’t be so amazed because I’m only number 5 or 6 of the Midnight Louie series and I know there are a ton more to read.

And I’ve put The Passing Bells on my wish list. I’ve always found novels that center around major social and cultural changes to be fascinating. Thanks for recommending it!

Wonderful post! I don’t read a lot of what Scott Turrow says. I never understood what his postion was all about and what the Author’s Guild was all about either. It dosen’t seem that they have any real use as they are stuck in the dark ages.
It’s wonderful that authors from the past now have a breath of fresh air breathed into their careers and are finding great success.
It gives us new writers hope for own futures.

Kris, I read the tragic news about Ben Wolverton and I was surprised to see that the family had no health insurance. I know that this isn’t uncommon for freelance sorts, and it’s something that weighs heavily on my mind whenever I consider full time writing in the future. For the folks that are freelance and do have insurance, what are their options? Do they just pay too much for bad coverage?

I usually don’t discuss politics on this blog, but I’m going to tell you all that I’m in favor of the new Health Care law precisely because it prevents circumstances like this. I can’t wait for it to be implemented fully, for the sake of my fellow writers.

I suspect that some are lacking health insurance due to insufficient knowledge of the options available to them. For example, here in Maryland small group coverage is available for firms with two employees. You need to be structured properly both in organization and compensation to qualify, but it is available.

As you have noted before, a lack of business experience is a common source of problems for writers. This is yet another area it has an impact in.

“The problem with Turow in particular, and a handful of others in the same circumstance, is that they were bestsellers from their first novel. Which makes them rather like that Coach Barry Switzer quote: “Some people were born on third base and thought they hit a triple.”” : that’s the part I preferred on your article.

Why ? Because that is what illustrate the best the changes in publishing, and the gap between Scott Turrow and indie authors. And from this gap, from these privileges earned so soon by Scott Turow derives his drive to clutch to these privileges by all means.

I also loved the quote by Carole Nelson Douglas (“anti-published”) so much I shared it on Facebook.

I read Turow’s piece with dismay, but was even more dismayed by the number of writers i know who were reposting it as a cautionary tale, apparently not knowing his apologist reputation or having read his previous screeds. I know that his problems go way beyond the scope of that single piece, but it seems to me that Turow can be most easily dispensed with by pointing out that he’s not stating a single thesis, but a pair of conjoined (and faulty) intermediate theorems.

When he says the author is dying, what he really means is that traditional publishing is dying, and that the traditional publishing is the only way to be an author. The problem with his politics is that he’s got way too much proof of the former, but his conflating the two sides of his argument makes those seem like proofs of the latter in too many writers’ eyes.

I did a two-part article this spring for NINK about all the ways new technology and distribution is enabling writers to expand their careers and income even over-and-above self-publishing ebooks. I started it as one article–but I had SO MUCH material that it wound up filling two. And this wasn’t based on heavy research. This was actually based on me having casually bookmarked various links I wanted to stop and look at more seriously.

I’m traditionally published (and very happy with my publisher, DAW Books). I’m also self-publishing my backlist (18 books posted, 4-5 more to go)–and I’m one of the unwashed masses who are The Big Story that’s not being reported. That is to say, my out-of-print backlist–books that had been sitting around dead and used-up for years, no market life left in them in the traditional publishing world–accounted for 1/3 of my income in 2012. And this is with modest sales of midlist backlist books that (to be candid) I’ve done nothing to promote because I’m so busy. So, obviously, I’m starting to make plans for self-publishing new work once I’ve got all the old work produced and posted. (And, happily, I’ve got all rights reverted to my entire backlist. My only under-contract rights these days are for my new work, on the stands, in a series which DAW is publishing well–and that’s a relationship I chose and cotninue to actively cultivate. So I also have more control over my career and my work than ever before.)

Speaking of the Nightshade debacle–another aspect of how much better things are for writers than they used to be is the impact of social media. In the old days (i.e. 4-5-10-15 years ago) when something like this happened, the writers would talk to their agents (most of whom would reply with some form of, “Lie back, close your eyes, and think of England”), and/or they might talk to each other (comforting, but not otherwise productive), or they might talk to their writer orgs (which might (or might not) try to do something, but it would typically be a very long (often: years long) process and might or might not eventually produce some sort of result. Mostly, writers just got victimized, and publishers just victimized writers with complete impunity.

These days, though–just LOOK at how fast, and furious, and NOISY the social media jungle drums are when publishers try to victimize writers. Skyhorse took only -a few days- to amend its egregious terms for authors (the new terms aren’t not great, but they’re certainly an improvement) in the Nightshade deal when they saw the IMMENSE uproar over what they had apparently thought was a private deal no one would ever know about other than the supposedly helpless writers who’d be victimized by it.

Look at how fast Random House (a huge corporation!) amended some of its most egregious terms in the vanity scam (Hydra, Alibi, Flirt) it launched after social media noisily and furiously condemned this con on all sides. That NEVER would have happened 10 years ago, or even 5 years ago.

The isolation of writers, and the silence this isolation imposed, is over. Social media has given us a powerful public-opinion voice that, it turns out, even big corporations can’t simply ignore. Because of the internet age and all the access to each other, the media, and our audience it gives us, it’s no longer EASY to simply victimize us–whereas it was DEAD EASY for years, like taking candy from babies. This is a huge sea change, and we’ve seen its effect a number of times in the past year or two, with publishers backing down on victimization gambits wherein they’d never have backed down before.

Another huge change, I realized after posting that, is how much less fear-based secrecy there is in the profession these days.

For decades, writers who had a complaint about a publisher (including something as serious as missing royalties, breach of contract, copyright violation, threats, etc.) wouldn’t talk to anyone about it because they were SO AFRAID their publisher or editor would find out they’d complained (or talked, or given evidence, or supported an advocacy effort against the publisher) and would punish them for it–punish, that is, by dropping them, not signing a new contract with them. Given that a single publisher usually accounted for most or all of a writer’s income, and that replacing that publisher could be a long uphill battle if the writer was dropped… it was such a frightening prospect that writers were often VERY secretive about the bad behavior of publishers.

It still goes on (ex. in a recent class action lawsuit that was filed against a publisher, there were writers who didn’t join the “class” because they were afraid their publisher would find out and punish them because of it, and there was a lot of effort invested in secrecy and protecting identities among the class so that the publisher would NOT be able to find out who was part of it–all because so MUCH of a writer’s income can rely on one sole publisher).

But it has changed a GREAT deal with the advent of self-publishing, where you’re not dealing with publishers, or you’ve got a solid income stream that doesn’t rely on publishers, and your self-pub venture involves multiple vendors and venues. (The ideal scenario will be, 5-10 years from now, for us to distribute among half a dozen wel-run, hot competitive ebook vendors; currently, there’s only one of those–Amazon–and then a bunch of also-rans doddling WAY behind that sole frontrunner.) People are walking away from publishers, they’re talking about it openly on social media, they’re complaining about bad treatment and breach of contract on social media, etc.

There suddenly just aren’t as many fear-based secrets dominating our profession. And the more the sunshine glares down on the business practices in our industry, the more we all know and the better choices we all have an opportunity to make–as well as the more pressure can be put on businesses engaging in egregious practices.

I think it’s VERY interesting, for example, that just this year, Harlequin has been exposed and sued for drastically underpaying royalties, so everyone knows about that. A court has now said that Harlequin’s contracts ALLOW this–so everyone submits to Harlequin and negotiates with them armed with that information. (Sure, lots of people won’t USE that information, but everyone one has the OPPORTUNITY to use it. The opportunity to say, “I’ll only sign if you change this clause that allows you to fleece me financially on royalties.”) AND that Ann Voss Peterson, a longtime Hq writer, has during this period posted earnings reports showing she’s made as much in about 6 -weeks- from a book as she’d have made over the course of YEARS if she had licensed that same book to Hq…

Very true. I’m helping with a history of sf magazines right now, and talking about things concerning my time at F&SF and things that certain book editors did to destroy my career because of my time as editor of F&SF, things I couldn’t say in the 1990s for fear of being blacklisted in the tiny sf community. (It was one of the many reasons I branched out to other genres.) That fear is mostly gone among in-the-know authors. Great points, Laura.

Glad I provided a title, Chris! I too loved The Passing Bells. Glad Rock’s legacy is back in print. When I run across genre publications from decades ago (yes, I save the evidence), I’m flabbergasted to see how many authors who “were something” then have disappeared.

I also loved it when I started meeting lawyers inspired by Scott Turow’s first breakout legal thriller as new authors at mystery conventions. We had latter-day editions of the Lawrence Block and cronies’ kvetch sessions, both being from Type A professions: the law and daily newspaper journalism. We couldn’t believe the lack of drive for so many titles in publishing. Seeing that motivated John Grisham to reinvent the legal thriller, big time.

I entered publishing in paperback, where there was no midlist, just cannon fodder to hold the display “pockets” for the few “lead” titles the publishers were promoting. I was thrilled to learn at the big Houston Airport book stand that my first novel, Amberleigh (and its beautiful but unembossed cover) was outselling V.C. Andrews’ latest. Only problem: 5-10 copies of mine had been bought and when they were gone… no reordering. Dozens of Andrews titles had been ordered. So they got my empty slot.

BSP: I just reread my first Midnight Louie mystery, about the murder of a Big Six imprint editor at the American Booksellers Association convention, which I’m preparing for eBook. I’m amazed I was able to get a book so critical of publishing realities published back then! Kudos to Tor for putting it out.

I loved Amberleigh, Carole. I didn’t realize it was your first novel. I read it around the same time as the Rock. Perhaps in that same pile of books. And thanks for letting me use the quote. It is so very accurate.

I just received my quarterly royalty statement for my one non-fiction book and was told that the ebook version of my book earned me $0.12 per copy based on the wholesale price (!?) of $5 and change with a retail price (for an non-fiction ebook) of $27.99(!)

And, of course, the numbers on the royalty statement make no sense as always.

I am SO GLAD that I wrote my contract such that my rights revert less than a year from now.

While I think I made the right decision almost 5 years ago, I would definitely have done better self publishing over the past 3 years.

It’s great that writers are having such a great time in their careers at the moment.

You and Dean are big on reaching the widest possible audiences, an important message, and Ella are working to make the paper book distribution side of indie publishing easier. With improved options for visibility things can only get better.

I just hope more do take up chances like those Ella Distribution will be offering and put out paper versions of their books. Lately I keep seeing people who are championing ebooks already consigning paperbacks to history and declaring them virtually obsolete. I worry that it might lead to less reader choice. At a time when writers have more options on how to publish, why would they then turn around and deny options on consumption of their work to the other important group in the business?

Apologies for the tangent. It truly is a great time for those who write.

The way all writers can help Ella become a force in indie publishing is to let your local bookstore know about it. The more bookstores that order from Ella, the quicker it will grow, which will make it more viable for indie publishers to join on. (After the next beta test, of course.) So that will help.

And that’s not a tangent at all. It’s really important to the reality on the ground. Thanks!

A fascinating but not surprising blog. I often look for books and/or authors I enjoyed years ago and cannot find them. Libraries don’t help because they “purge” books that don’t fly off the shelves and heaven help the reader who decides to read classics from other periods–try finding Dickens other than “A Christmas Carol”or even writers from the 20th century who were popular or well thought of. But I repeat myself.

And thanks for introducing me to David Farland. His book Nightingale is now on my Kindle along with the first in his Ravenspell series. I read and buy a lot of young adult and children’s books–have to keep ahead of the game for my grandchildren.

One of the most wonderful things to me about the modern publishing age is that effort is rewarded. I spent ten years writing stories and having them rejected by editors or agents. Now I write stories… and sell them as fast as I write them. No more waiting for someone to allow me to get to my readers. No more spending two months on a manuscript and then having it tied up for years as one by one the major publishers hang on to it for a year only to say “I can’t market this one, try someone else.”

That I could–and did–spend six or seven years trying to sell one manuscript because of the “no simultaneous submission” thing… *shakes head*

Kris: Thank you so much for the kind mention of Ben. Writers and fans have really contributed so much to Ben, and I’ve been moved to tears of gratitude daily because of it. You’re right in the assessment of publishing. I do have a big series that I could push in a book bomb, but to do so wouldn’t help much. Getting a check would take long months. So those who have bought my novel NIGHTINGALE, or my book on writing, MILLION-DOLLAR OUTLINES, have really been a tremendous help. A writer couldn’t have done this quite as well ten years ago.

The outpouring has been wonderful, Dave, although I’m so sorry for the circumstance that caused it. We’re thinking of Ben and you & Mary and your entire family. I’m glad that the book bomb is going well (Folks, if you haven’t bought a book, do so now!) and I hope it only continues. Hugs–